Our business goal is, quite simply, to be the best provider of software test
automation tools. Unlike other vendors who make you do things their way,
or use automation as a Trojan Horse to sell other test equipment and/or software,
AbeachA has no hidden agenda. Our mission is to give complete and total
control of the software test automation environment to our customers,
so that they can create a software test automation system unique
to their business needs.

AbeachA Automation Overview

The AbeachA Ai21 is designed to control the execution of software
test cases, which are commonly referred to as test programs, or test
scripts. The automated test case is the smallest (atomic),
most reliable, and controllable level of testing. Although
test cases can be generated by 3rd party test tools, the Ai21 is
more at home with test cases created by automation engineers. This
is due to the fact that test cases designed and written by dedicated
engineers are specific to business needs, more powerful, and more
flexible than test cases created by a generic test case generator.

The AbeachA automation philosophy is based on the concept of controlling
atomic test cases in any manner desired to achieve a virtually unlimited
number of test scenarios specific to your business goals.

A successful software test automation system consists of three major
components. The first component is a scheduling mechanism for
controlling the running of automation jobs on the test beds. The
second component is the mechanism that runs the test cases, collects
the results, and generates a report, while the third component is
the test cases unique to your business.

In the past, companies used engineering resources to design, debug, implement, and
maintain all three components. Aside from being inefficient and wasteful, this
exercise does not fit in with today's accelerated schedules that require us to do more
in less time with fewer engineering resources. Realizing this, AbeachA created
the Ai21, the Automation Infrastructure for the 21st Century.

The Ai21 fulfills two-thirds of a successful automation system by providing a robust,
reliable, highly configurable and flexible software test scheduler and test execution
environment. By focusing engineering resources and time on the one-third portion
of automation, the test cases, unique to your business, you will develop a successful
software automation test system. By creating and running test cases that control
aspects of your test environment, the Ai21 quickly becomes a powerful, productive,
essential, cost-effective tool tailored to your testing needs.

Since it would take over a year of engineering time and resources to approach the
functionality and reliability of the Ai21, this time, and associated costs, can
now be focused on your business goals. Thus enabling a faster time to market
with a higher quality product at a lower internal cost.

The following diagram illustrates a few features of the Ai21.

Mostly going from the left to the right on the above diagram, we see:

Event (email) driven.

Email can be from an automated software build system, an individual, or the web based interface.

If a test bed is available then the job runs. Otherwise, it goes into a queue.

An automation job can request to be run on a specific test bed.

An automation job can request the first available test bed of a particular type.

The same test case can be simultaneously run against multiple test beds.

As a test cases finishes the results are returned to the run tests program.

Once all test cases are run a report is emailed to a distribution list.

One final point is that the distributed design of the Ai21 allows
the test beds to be remotely located.

Manual Control

However, no matter how configurable, flexible, and reliable an automation environment is,
the ability to manually control it is an integral part of a successful software test automation
environment. For manual control, AbeachA provides a web-form and CGI program that
allows custom automation jobs, consisting of individual test cases, entire test suites,
and complete pre-defined test suite groups, to be executed once or 'n' times in any
order. Naturally, this manual control can override any default system configuration,
and the source code (web-form and CGI program) is provided to allow customization for
individual business needs.

The power and flexibility of AbeachA automation will be the standard for
software test automation.